Realistically the metadata would regularly be at odds with the visible data. > Having a standard to encode semantics seems honestly necessary at this point if

Realistically the metadata would regularly be at odds with the visible data. > Having a standard to encode semantics seems honestly necessary at this point if you want to keep things interoperable. The trick is with the incentive structure. Metadata is very common on academic paper pages, because Google scholar doesn't index them if they don't have it. However it's also commonly just wrong.